Best. Book. Ever.

Yesterday, on my drizzly trip across campus, I saw a small dark shape beneath the clocktower. Yup, it was a bloodied wing, and nearby, a severed bird foot (when they take off the foot, it isn't a clean cut - at the knee, it looks as if the ligaments were pulled out of the leg itself, leaving a sort of jaunty, loose tassel. Smart, really, else the stringy parts might get caught in one's beak...and everybody knows that birds can't floss). I smiled and smiled...evidently the falcons don't necessarily migrate, they're home for the winter. We watched one sit on the second-highest level of the tower, fluffing and turning, and surveying his domain.

Someone in the office got this book:


It is really the best book I have read in, like, forever. I laughed and cried. And cried. They glue cracks in the shells (thinned from DDT), and foster the hatched babies first with hand puppets (that's one on the cover), and then in falcon nests (where they've left plaster eggs that suddenly become teenage chicks overnight) before releasing them. It's such a delicate undertaking.